Author Archive

Anonymous 4 and special guest Bruce Molsky commemorate the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War with songs that were in the air in the year 1865. It includes ballads and choruses originally intended for the stage and the parlor, as well as songs and instrumental tunes from the hills and back roads of America. They portray the highly emotional, personal stories of soldiers, widows and others who lived through one of the bloodiest wars in American history.

1865 — subtitled Songs of Hope and Home from the American Civil War — is the third release in what’s become an Americana triptych from Anonymous 4 (less anonymously, Ruth Cunningham, Marsha Genensky, Susan Hellauer and Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek).This time around, they’re joined by an excellent old-time musician, Bruce Molsky, who sings and plays fiddle, banjo and guitar.

It’s an organic collaboration, but the combination also evokes a specific dynamic: women tending the homefront, men on the battlefield. And as in their two previous releases of American songs, American Angels and Gloryland, the singing is gorgeous, with deep, sweet feeling. By the time “Abide with Me” and “Shall We Gather at the River” roll around at the close of this album, it’s quite possible you’ll be sniffling.

One hundred and 50 years on, there are still a few songs whose tunes and ideas remain familiar, including Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More,” published in 1854, and Robert Lowry’s 1864 “Shall We Gather at the River?” Another, the 1861 love song “Aura Lee,” found new life in another context altogether, as the melody for one of Elvis Presley’s biggest hits, “Love Me Tender.” But some have largely receded from popular memory; if some of today’s alt-folkies are looking for “new” material, there’s plenty here.

It’s nearly impossible to overstate how important singing was during the Civil War, not just for those waiting back home but to the fighting men as well. Songwriters raced to churn out thousands of new tunes and publishers created small booklets of lyrics, called “songsters,” that soldiers and civilians could carry in their pockets. Some were abolitionist songs, some were Southern and in many, words were switched out to favor one side or the other.

But as Anonymous 4 mention in their liner notes, there are many wartime accounts of opposing soldiers, in their camps pitched across a battlefield or river from each other, trading songs back and forth in succession and even raising their voices together. In the present days of deep rifts and political enmities — hard times, to be sure — it’s good to remember what has the power to bind us together.

Antoine Moundanda is one of the prominent figures of African music and in particular of the Congolese scene. Singer and composer, he plays the Likembe, or Kisansi, better known as the Sanza (traditional instrument composed of metal slats fixed on a hollow wooden chamber). The literature about Congo music contains intriguing speculation about the influence of likembés or sanza traditions on the development of modern Congo music, especially the guitar parts.

As early as 1955 an international career opened up for Antoine Moundanda. He travelled to the four corners of the Earth, with his Sanza in his hand, now solo then with other artists. A perfectionist, resolutely modern, he has given a new dimension to this traditional instrument by taking it from 9 to 22 blades. An exceptional singer, an inspired composer, Antoine Moundanda is one of the creators of Rumba, one of the founding fathers of all modern Zairo-Congolese music.

Moundanda: “I learnt music playing the Kisani, accompanying my father in his work as a healer. As he looked after the sick I played music to keep out the bad spirits and to calm the patients. After his death I went to Brazzaville where I worked for the first time, in a Senegalese engineer’s family. At this time, under French and Belgian colonisation the industrialisation of Brazzaville and Leopoldville was in full swing.

Numerous factories were flowering on either side of the river as were nightclubs, like the “Congo Bar”, where Paul Kamba performed with his “Victoria Brazza Orchestra”. Kamba encouraged me to become professional and to create Likembé Géant at the beginning of the 50s. We recorded with this group thirty or so albums for the label Ngoma, several of which won the Osborn Prize, notably because we had introduced the likembé into modern Congolese music.

We played polka, djebola, rumba and traditional themes… resolutely inspired by our regional folklore. We had a lot of success. For example, for the opening night of a bar-restaurant in Bangui on the 31st December 1954 the audience preferred us to Kabelese’s African Jazz! We got the privilege of making people dance all evening. Quite dismayed, Kabalese and his band left before the end of the night!

But at the end of the 50s everything started to change. The public was no longer interested in us. They preferred to listen to pop music and the electric guitar: O.K. Jazz, the Bantous, Tabu Ley, things like that…. Ngoma’s studio was shut down. After that there was Independence and Papa Kourant and I found ourselves isolated. We had to go back to the jungle! Years of suffering followed up until 1967 when we got first prize at Dakar’s Festival des Arts Noirs (Festival of Black Art). After that, with a bit of good luck, we were able to work with the Congolese National Ballet and to collaborate with the Sony Labou Tansi’s Rocado Zulu theatre. Today if the general public want to re-discover their love of acoustic music, then they can count on us.”

Rock ‘n’ roll is a combination of blues, and it’s a strange thing made up of two parts. A lot of people don’t know this, but the blues, which is an American music, is not what you think it is. It’s a combination of Arabic violins and Strauss waltzes working it out. But it’s true.

The other half of rock ‘n’ roll has got to be hillbilly. And that’s a derogatory term, but it ought not to be. That’s a term that includes the Delmore Bros., Stanley Bros., Roscoe Holcomb, Clarence Ashley … groups like that. Moonshiners gone berserk. Fast cars on dirt roads. That’s the kind of combination that makes up rock ‘n’ roll, and it can’t be cooked up in a science laboratory or a studio.

I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.

If you sang “John Henry” as many times as me — “John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.”

If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written “How many roads must a man walk down?” too.

“Roll the cotton down, aw, yeah, roll the cotton down / Ten dollars a day is a white man’s pay / A dollar a day is the black man’s pay / Roll the cotton down.” If you sang that song as many times as me, you’d be writing “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more,” too.

I sang a lot of “come all you” songs. There’s plenty of them. There’s way too many to be counted. “Come along boys and listen to my tale / Tell you of my trouble on the old Chisholm Trail.” Or, “Come all ye good people, listen while I tell / the fate of Floyd Collins a lad we all know well / The fate of Floyd Collins, a lad we all know well.”

“Come all ye fair and tender ladies / Take warning how you court your men / They’re like a star on a summer morning / They first appear and then they’re gone again.” “If you’ll gather ’round, people / A story I will tell / ‘Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw / Oklahoma knew him well.”

If you sung all these “come all ye” songs all the time, you’d be writing, “Come gather ’round people where ever you roam, admit that the waters around you have grown / Accept that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone / If your time to you is worth saving / And you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone / The times they are a-changing.”

You’d have written them too. There’s nothing secret about it. You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that’s all enough, and that’s all I sang. That was all that was dear to me. They were the only kinds of songs that made sense.

All these songs are connected. Don’t be fooled. I just opened up a different door in a different kind of way. It’s just different, saying the same thing. I didn’t think it was anything out of the ordinary.

Who could ever have expected to discover that some of the most exciting dance music ever recorded was still being played among the Creole population of a tiny island in the Indian Ocean?

To say I was gobsmacked on first hearing is the understatement of the decade. Only subsequent research revealed that the performers were formally constituted as the Anse Boileau Kamtole Band, and were still (twenty years ago, at any rate) performing regularly in a hotel context for tourists, in tandem with a female quadrille demonstration team.

It is hardly surprising that this fact was played down in the sleevenotes to the Ocora issue, for the music is so old at its core that such a revelation would have been simply redundant. Fiddles, guitars, banjo-mandolin and bass drum with cymbal are overlaid with the most rhythmically-inventive triangle ever, the complex playing being all the more admirable for the performer simultaneously calling the dance instructions.

The notes suggested that in the past (the featured items were made in 1977) the ‘accordeon’ (for which read ‘melodeon’), ‘which is becoming ever rarer [on the island]’, had formerly been an integral part of the music. Recordings made slightly later, and released on Anse Boileau Kantole Band : Seychelles – Musique Traditionelle (Palm, no number) and Souvenir of Seychelles Camtole Music Introducing The Anse Boileau Camtole Band (Dasco DAS 006), restore the instrument and what a great addition it proves to be. This is essentially archaic dance music, originally performed in England and thence throughout the European continent during the eighteenth century, filtered through the vernacular tradition and transformed beyond all recognition into something truly spectacular.

Music from Georgia: World Routes, An Appalachian Road Trip,Episode 3 of 3

Musician and writer Banning Eyre heads to the American state of Georgia, gateway to the Deep South, and southern end of the Appalachian Mountains, to record some of the unique vocal music that has been preserved in the area, and meet the personalities who have kept the traditions alive.

Banning drops in to the converted chicken shack that is home to Phil Tanner and the Skillet Lickers, to hear them in their weekly session. Phil is the grandson of chicken farmer Gid Tanner who in 1924, with the original Skillet Lickers, became the first southern rural artist to record for the Columbia record label, and whose blend of music and comedy sold millions.

He meets 92 year old blind gospel legend Sister Fleeta Mitchell, who still sings and plays the piano alongside her musical companion the Revd Willie Mae Eberhardt, herself in her late 70s. Together they recall disturbing tales of life in the south, and the songs that gave people hope.

The Myers Family and Friends, a singing family of guitar playing ladies, recall the songs they sang as children for corn shuckings and bean stringings, and local artist and folk song collector Art Rosenbaum talks about the unique character of North Georgia, and picks a tune on one of his many banjos.

As well as the banjos and the ballads, Banning also attends the 141st Annual Alpharetta June Singing, and discovers that the 19th Century tradition of congregational ‘shape note’ singing still lives on in the south.

Mandolin Tab for Ten Early Caribbean Dance Tunes – Paseos, Meringues and more

In honor of an upcoming trip to the Spanish Virgin Island of Culebra in Puerto Rico, I’ve assembled ten Afro-Caribbean string band tunes from the recordings of the now defunct Etcetera String Band (Bonne Humeur) and Kansas City based The Rhythmia to work on while there. Both bands have a knack for uncovering obscure tunes from Haiti, Trinidad, Louisiana, the Virgin Islands, Martinique and Venezuela.

Many of these tunes date back to the 1800’s and share similarities to common fiddle tunes and rags, while still retaining a distinctly “island” feel that helps tag them as being from the Caribbean. Guitarist Kevin Sanders – a member of both the Etcetera String Band and The Rhythmia – helped me obtain a copy of the out of print Bonne Humeur CD last year which is definitely worth seeking out if you’re interested in this type of music. All transcriptions posted here were done by Nick DiSebastian. Here’s a YouTube playlist where some of these tunes can be heard.

This is a collection of dance music as played during the late 19th century and early 20th century in Louisiana, Haiti, Trinidad, Martinique and Virgin Islands. The music represents a blending of European and African music, contains elements later found in ragtime, and is essential to anyone interested in exploring the murky world of “pre-jazz” or examining the fascinating links between the musics of New Orleans and the Caribbean.

ANNA ROBERTS-GEVALT and ELIZABETH LAPRELLE are based in Southwest Virginia. They met, coming at traditional Appalachian music from different directions. Anna was in a touring old-time band. Elizabeth was singing ballads in far-away states.

They came together to create a different kind of show: one that used theater and stories to show people what they love about old tunes and ballads. They also knew that keeping the music in the mountains–playing in their communities, playing for schools–was part of the job. With that, they set about making crankies, and learning stories, and trading songs and tunes.

Anna & Elizabeth honor Appalachian artistry and shed new light upon tradition. They have made their most compelling work to date in their new self-titled album on Free Dirt Records.

A collection of 16 traditional songs thoughtfully gathered and interpreted, the album guides listeners through the duo’s intense personal connection with each song, for an experience that is as warm and intimate as their one-of-a-kind live performances.

Soaring through rousing old-time dance numbers, haunting Appalachian ballads and lilting lullabies, Anna & Elizabeth showcases the incredible vocal capabilities of both LaPrelle and Roberts-Gevalt, and shimmers with breathtaking moments of harmony, all laid atop masterfully executed instrumentals. A record equally as invigorating as it is contemplative, Anna & Elizabeth allows for the prolific talents of these two young women to shine brighter than ever before.

The Gowanus Canal is polluted with heavy metals — but for one day only it’s going acoustic.

The fourth-ever Banjo Toss contest is capping-off this year’s Brooklyn Folk Festival, giving attendees of the weekend-long hootenanny of American roots music a chance to strum the rustic instrument before taking turns throwing one in the waterway.

The Banjo Toss, along with the festival, is the brainchild of musician Eli Smith, who said the idea for the competition came out of his love-hate relationship with the instrument he’s played for 15 years.

“Sometimes I just want to throw my banjo across the room,” said Smith. “And I thought, that might be a pretty fun idea for a contest.”

To avoid destroying numerous banjos, Smith decided to have contestants pitch one instrument repeatedly into a body of water. A rope tied to the sacrificial banjo will act as a watermark to determine who throws it the farthest, as well as a life-line to draw the instrument back on to land.

Smith added that he will provide contestants with gloves to protect them from the toxins, oil, human waste, and gonorrhea floating in the Venice of Brooklyn. The winner will receive a free banjo, which they can either learn to play or — since they’ve had enough practice already — sling into the canal.

Smith said competitors are free to try any track-and-field technique they want in the banjo toss.

“It’s really freestyle,” said Smith, who personally favors a shot put approach. “If you have an idea how to throw it, go for it.”

“I feel current,” laughs multi-instrumentalist Mick Kinney as he sits on his front porch in picturesque Pine Lake, GA, not too far from the acoustic haven of Decatur. “I just feel a little—um, obscure.”

For Mick Kinney, obscurity is a way of life. “When I play, people come up and say, ‘This is so great, where did this stuff come from?’ I say, ‘Well, you should check out the source.’”

“One day when I was about ten years old, my dad comes in and says, ‘One of the guys at work didn’t want this and said we could have it.’ He comes in with this wind-up Victrola… with a chest of records under it,” he explains excitedly, showing his visitor the prized possession. “It was stocked full of everything you can imagine. I loved it instantly, and I’d play along with it on the piano.”

But Dad liked the older music on the old 78s, so they found a common ground. Their mom had played piano before she abandoned it to raise the family. The instrument, banished to the basement, fascinated the budding musicians. “I saw [pianist] Eubie Blake on the Tonight Show, during the ragtime craze of ‘The Sting’ and all that, in the early ’70s. He said he’d written ‘The Charleston Rag’ when he was, like, 16. Well, I was 16 then, so I decided right then that I could write a rag too! And so I did.”

After hiking to Georgia on the Appalachian Trail in ’76, Kinney decided to stay and become a part of the scene. But instead of finding a place in the fledgling new wave and punk clubs, he focused his attention on bluegrass and old-time fiddle music. “I’d go to the fiddle conventions way north of here and learn from the old guys,” he says. “I learned the Georgia fiddle repertoire, and it’s very different from the standard; there’s a lot of Civil War and Reconstruction tunes in there. Pretty soon, [local pioneer] Fonzie Kennemer became my mentor of sorts.”

Stints in Irish and zydeco groups followed, and during a local buzz of excitement about his unique fiddle style, he moved on again. “I don’t like to settle,” he says, strumming a vintage Kay guitar, “I like to mix it up.” Finally in 2002, a collection of his songs appeared on his debut album, the eclectic Nothing Left To Chance. “I call it my greatest hits record,” he chuckles. “I figured I’d start with that and then move on to the other kinds of music I’ve been working on.”

After a lengthy collaboration with his professional and personal partner, the effusive cabaret artist Elise Witt and their friend, the late Stranger Malone, Kinney issued Rag Nouveau earlier this year. The collection of original ragtime compositions is “still coming out,” he explains. “Some of this stuff was written in the ’80s, so when you consider the gestation period, it’s still brand new—to me anyway.”

Truly “new” releases from Kinney include the tentatively titled Secret Songbook, a collection of decidedly retro performances, eerily channeling the Great American Songbook, and multiple appearances in the documentary DVD Who’s That Stranger?, a loving tribute to Malone by Peabody-winning filmmaker George King.

Time stamps mean nothing to Kinney, and he’s instilling that ideal in his sons, ages 23 and 13. “My youngest son is into Django Rhinehart and Stephani Grapelli and even Dick Dale. He thinks ‘OK, The Who was 40 years ago, and this kinda thing may be 20 years before that.’ He looks at it like I did, as music.”

For Mick Kinney, the past is present. “I’m totally happy with representing a time and place that maybe never existed. I try to be a time machine, a way to take people away from now.”

“If you haven’t heard it, it’s new,” he smiles as he sings part of an obscure ditty from decades ago. “It’s all 20th century mood music.”

Start planning for this gathering on Hallowed-Old-Time-Grounds, where Riley Puckett played on the streets, Andrew & Jim Baxter dug graves & wells during the week, then played music for hundreds of events on the weekend, for almost 50 years

This was Ground Zero for the roots of Country Music during the birth of it’s recording, and Calhoun can be easily be called cradle of these efforts, as experts have expressed.

As many as 5000 attended our Gordon County Fiddlers’ Convention, back in the 1920’s, as it was THE event of the year.

We have brought it back, in all it’s glory, and we need YOU to come help us celebrate this delightful and important heritage!

Over the course of 70 years, Alan Lomax was one of America’s finest treasures as an honored music archivist who collected tens of thousands of songs from all over the globe. PledgeMusic is proud to partner with the Alan Lomax Archive for a proper celebration of Alan’s 100th birthday with a definitive Centennial box set that includes 100 songs on six LPs. We recently asked Nathan Salsburg, Curator of the Association for Cultural Equity, which Lomax founded, for further perspective on his legacy, his favorite pieces to listen to and the scope of the new box set.

Those who pre-order through PledgeMusic get behind-the-scenes access to the production of the box set. Fans get access to rare exclusives including a 78-rpm record from Lomax’s own collection, a copy of the Grammy-winning set of Lomax’s 1938 Library of Congress recordings with Jelly Roll Morton, a series of fan-curated 7″ singles, and the opportunity to vote on which songs are included in the 7″ series, and the exclusive Alan Lomax Centennial T-shirt. For more information, head to the Alan Lomax PledgeMusic page here http://www.pledgemusic.com/alanlomax

Alan’s passion for music knew no bounds. Do you know if he had personal favorite artists, songs or even genres?

Lomax did have his favorites. Among singers, he was especially fond of Vera Ward Hall, a black washerwoman and nursemaid from Livingston, Alabama, and the Scots traveler balladeer Jeannie Robertson. I think it’s safe to say he found the work songs and hollers of the Southern penitentiary system — the songs he first recorded with his father in 1933, and returned to document again on three other trips over 25 years — among the most powerful (“noble” was an adjective he used) of America’s vernacular musics. But he was no purist. He later expressed much appreciation for Prince and Michael Jackson.

The scope of this project is what might be most impressive. What was the process like to distill down this collection into 100 songs?

It was no easy task. Lomax recorded over 3000 hours of music, and while one of our primary intentions is to adequately present the depth and breadth of his collections, we also want to make sure it’s fun to listen to. There are songs that have had profound cultural and musical influence and absolutely must be included in any consideration of Lomax’s legacy. At the same time, there are totally obscure performances from remote locations that are deeply and wonderfully idiosyncratic representations of the artists who sang them and the communities they sang them in. Striking that balance was both very difficult and very rewarding.

Alan earned a significant number of accolades both in his lifetime and posthumously. Do you still feel like there’s at least some aspect of his life or work that remains overlooked?

Alan’s progressivism is crucial to understanding his life’s work. His notion that preserving, promoting, and nurturing traditional and vernacular music isn’t antiquarianism but activism is one that we’d do well to remember and honor today. He once said that the felt the right of cultural equity should take its place among all the other fundamental rights of man.

Nebraska fiddler Bob Walters is little-known outside Missouri Valley fiddle circles, but that’s about to change with the new release of eighty of Bob’s best tunes on “Bob Walters, The Champion: Classic Missouri Valley Fiddling from Dwight Lamb’s Collection.”

Long before the days of the iPod or even the portable tape recorder, Dwight Lamb was collecting recordings from Bob Walters on wire recorders, reel-to-reels, or whatever the latest technology might be. Now we’re lucky to have his amazing collection of Bob Walters recordings cherry-picked into this giant two-CD set which demonstrates both Mr. Walters’ mastery of the instrument and his breadth of repetoire. The set includes reels, waltzes, polkas and quadrilles, and even a few more rare birds, and tunes are sourced all the way from Kentucky to Canada and beyond.

Standouts include some familiar tunes like Bill Cheatum and Dusty Miller, along with contest favorites like The Inimitable Reel and Friendship Waltz, as well as less commonly known gems like the masterful Silver Lake Quadrille and The Prodigal Son. Instrumentation includes plenty of solo fiddle and guitar/fiddle, as well as Goldie Walters’ stellar pump organ playing and a few featuring Dwight playing along on his accordion.

Walters is a seminal figure in Midwestern fiddling whose influence on the tradition was considerable during the 1940 and 50s, the heyday of agricultural broadcasting in the Central states. Walters, a Nebraska native, performed over numerous radio stations in the region and was widely admired and imitated by such well-known performers as Cyril Stinnett, Lonnie Robertson and Dwight Lamb.

The recordings, most dating to the 1950s, are from Dwight Lamb’s personal collection. The Walters and Lamb families were close friends when Dwight was growing up and he became Walters protege, ultimately learning much of his repertoire. If you liked the two recordings of Dwight released by Rounder (Hell Agin the Barn Door and Joseph Won A Coated Fiddle) then this album will be of great interest. Incidentally, Mark Wilson, who produced Dwight’s CDs and many other great recordings in the North American Traditions Series, had a hand in this work. Included on the CD is an extensive set of notes by Mark in PDF format.

Bob Walters appeared on two cassettes issued by the Missouri State Old Time Fiddlers Association and figured prominently on the U of MO Press two-record LP The Old Time Fiddlers Repertory. All of these recordings are out-of-print, so this new release of Walters music is of particular importance. It is worth noting that transcriptions of Walters’ music outnumber all others in R. P. Christeson’s two volumes of The Old Time Fiddlers Repertory.

To order write to Missouri Valley Music, 511 South Pleasant, Canton, South Dakota 57013 or send an email to missourivalleymusic@sio.midco.net. The CD set costs $20, including postage.

Africa remains a musical mystery for many people. Yes, the internet can in theory answer any of your questions about the hundreds of musical traditions and genres of the continent, but many of the artists who progress or add to these traditions and styles of music aren’t online. The simple fact is that that only 7% of Africa’s population is online.

To generalise, Westerners can like an artist’s Facebook page, comment on one of their videos, download a song for free from SoundCloud, and stream a whole album without breaking a sweat – this is not the case for the majority of Africa, partly because there is no artist online, at least in some followable capacity, in the first place.

The digital divide between affluent nations and Africa is an intense gap, seemingly impossible to cross or breach in any way. Musical treasures of the past and modern musical talents tend to not reach Western ears, not often anyway, and as a result pretty much all African music can be labelled as, unfairly but understandably, obscure, or treated as an exotic oddity – as if it can’t be held to exist within itself until it has been assimilated, altered and eventually accepted by the West.

That is why it would be a lot nicer if we could hear African music all the time, to dissuade its detractors and cease reductionist exoticism and usher it into the canon of the music of the world, of the internet, and even have it counted as popular music, dispelling any sense of Otherness that traditional African music makes some people feel.

The humble and formerly ubiquitous cassette tape turned 50 years old in August 2013. Brian Shimkovitz, whose Awesome Tapes From Africa blog and record label throw open the aural windows to African music, scenes and subgenres the West would never have learned about otherwise.

“My whole mission has been to show people what African music sounds like in Africa,” says Los Angeles-based Shimkovitz, whose fascination with Africana exploded during the he spent researching the hip-hop scene in Ghana with the help of a Fulbright grant. Back then, a locally produced cassette cost a fraction of what a Europe-pressed CD went for. “Cassette technology has been conducive to the decentralization, diversification and marked expansion of recording industries,” wrote ethnomusicologist Peter Manuel in 1993, noting that Ghana then boasted more than 2,700 dubbing shops and yearly sales of some 2 million bootleg cassettes.

Home to some of the world’s most beautiful and diverse sounds, Mali’s huge capital city, Bamako, turned out to be especially fertile territory for Shimkovitz’s cassette fever. “It’s not like crate digging,” he says of his shopping expeditions, “because you’re buying the same things anyone else could find. They’re often pieces of art in their own way, but they’re not necessarily as rare as the vinyl people dig for in garages and basements. Which is part of the fun, because it’s accessible to everybody and quite cheap.”

It’s a Wednesday evening in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Feral Matt Foster is playing an old acoustic guitar in front of a red curtain on a handmade wooden stage. The crowd in front of him sits on benches that resemble church pews. The space feels old, but it’s been operating for less than a decade. There are white-haired neighborhood folks interspersed among the mostly 20- and 30-something crowd. Halfway through the show, a basket is sent around to collect tips for the performers. Foster is hosting Roots and Ruckus night: a free, weekly folk show at the Jalopy Theater.

“Traditional folk” has roots in the recordings from the Depression Era or earlier — everything from Appalachian ballads to rough, unproduced field recordings. There is a profound, unshakable pain in that music. Though there are plenty of sorrowful songs from every era, there’s a specific rawness and deep-seated ache to traditional folk music that is largely foreign to contemporary folk and pop.

That’s largely because traditional folk music has typically grown out of rural America, and that America is shrinking. With rapid urbanization, cities have expanded and suburbs have transformed; a 2013 U.S. census reported that, from 2010-12, rural county populations declined as a whole for the first time in history.

“Though some small pockets may have access to the rich, rural roots of our past,” musician and Jalopy mainstay Eli Smith argues, “It’s not coherent or vibrant in the way that it used to be.” Farmers have been selling their land or paring down — and with it, culture is getting pared down. Traditional folk and blues often sounds like it’s from another world — let alone another time. Its reference points are becoming scarcer as rural America dwindles. For all of NYC’s history of folk music, a giant metropolitan city with no recent rural history to speak of is an odd place for a contemporary revival to take place.

A native New Yorker, Smith started out as a banjo teacher at Jalopy. In addition to being a musician, he also hosts the Down Home Radio Show and runs two folk festivals — one in Brooklyn and another in Washington Square Park. He helped launch a streaming internet radio station, Jalopy Radio, and is spearheading the relaunch of Jalopy Records — a record label that released Long Island country musician Pat Conte‘s] American Songs with Fiddle and Banjo in 2011, but went quiet shortly after.

Smith grew up yearning for a new folk movement in New York, but it wasn’t until his 20s that he began to see the outlines of a scene developing. Jalopy — and later, Brooklyn Rod & Gun — have been instrumental in its development.

The fast pace of cities and social media can become exhausting. The folk movement offers an answer to this conundrum: the way forward is to cultivate the past. As Smith explains, “We’re left with the cultural inheritance of that era which is incredible.”

Traditional folk music channels a very particular energy — its pared-down instrumentation and often gut-wrenching vocal delivery has a way of making it feel almost eerily personal. “I think [there’s a] key to humanity and psychological well-being that we’re searching for in the music,” Smith says.

It’s Valcour’s 27th release and our most massive undertaking to date: a landmark, limited edition project to celebrate our tenth year in business along with the Alan Lomax Centennial!

Producers Joel Savoy and Josh Caffery have collaborated to create Rediscovering Lomax in Evangeline Country, a one-of-a-kind collection of recordings featuring Louisiana artists performing fresh takes on a unique series of folk songs—both French and English—archived in Louisiana in the 1930s by the late Alan and John Lomax.

While individual EPs will become available in stores each quarter, the limited edition full box set will be available exclusively on the Valcour website through the end 2015 as long as supplies last. Purchases of the box set include printed liner notes, a collector’s box for holding the CDs and liner notes and advance access to each release before retailers and radio stations. Digital liner notes will be available for free download on this page starting on March 31st.

If you order the box set, we will ship the box, liners and the first EP, Good Men, Bad Men, to you before March 31, and you will receive a new EP in the mail each quarter during 2015 until you have the full set of four discs. Subsequent EPs will include (in no particular order) Dancing and Seduction, Love and Death and Good Women, Bad Women.

Learn more about the book that inspired this project, Joshua Caffery’s Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings, here.

2:00PM Uncle Shlomo’s Brooklyn Kids – a traditional music ensemble comprised of some of Shlomo Pestcoe’s young private music students (ages 9 – 16) and his grownup musician friends who are all highly acclaimed local performers. 2:45PM Hoodoo Honeydrippers – Country Blues duet 3:30PM Art Rosenbaum - Grammy Award winning musician and folklorist 4:15PM “Treasure from the Archive Roadshow” - Live performance of music from the collections of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress featuring the Down Hill Strugglers, John Cohen and Nathan Salsburg 5:00PMFamoro Dioubate – Djeli playing Mande Balafon music from Guinea 5:45PM Bruce Molsky – Old time fiddle, banjo and guitar 6:30PM Four o’clock Flowers - Blues and Folk duet

All workshops and film screenings are included with the price of admission..!

Saturday1:00PM Old Time Jam Session2:30PM Songs of Freedom with Mat Callahan & Yvonne Moore – Discovering the Irish Revolutionary songs of James Connolly!3:15PM Folk City! A presentation about the history of folk music in New York by Stephen Petrus from the Museum of the City of New York4-5:30pm “Singing in Harmony”, Vocal Harmony Workshop with Don Friedman and Phyllis Elkind
“We’ll pick a few songs from the world of old-time, early country, bluegrass and gospel, teach the melody and harmony parts, and before you know it, you’ll be singing in two and three part harmony! We’ll do each song as a group and then give you a chance to try it out as a duet or trio. All levels of singers welcome!”

Sunday1:00PM Banjo Toss – The famous banjo throwing competition. Win a free banjo!
– Assemble at 1pm in front of the venue for the parade to the banjo tossing arena!2:30PM Selected films by Alan Lomax with introduction and commentary from Nathan Salsburg, curator of the Alan Lomax Archive3:30PM Fiddle Workshop with Bruce Molsky5:00PM Old Time Banjo Workshop with Art Rosenbaum (Grammy award winning musician and folklorist)6:30pm Square Dance!

Blues prophet Robert Johnson (1911–38) and other early blues guitarists captivated listeners with a new way of playing their instrument. Sliding a steel bar or other hard object over the strings to change the guitar’s pitch, they created a sound eerily like that of a weeping or singing human voice. Later blues and rock musicians such as Muddy Waters (1915–83) and Bonnie Raitt (b. 1949) would further improvise on the sound.

Scholars have mostly agreed that the slide style was directly influenced by the “diddley bow” or “jitter-bug,” a single-stringed instrument they say was carried to America by West African slaves. The more likely story, John W. Troutman argues in Southern Cultures, is that the musical technique popularized in the Mississippi Delta came from traveling Native Hawaiian musicians. Tracing the proliferation of their playing style, writes Troutman, a historian at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and weekend steel guitarist, once again underlines just how many ethnic and racial groups have shaped southern culture.

In the 19th century, the American South was just one of a number of regions around the world experiencing an influx of newcomers. Half a world away, Honolulu harbor received a steady stream of “sailors, whalers, merchants, missionaries, entrepreneurs, and laborers from distant lands such as the United States, Portugal, Mexico, and Japan,” as well as cowboys from Latin America brought in to wrangle cattle. With all these foreigners also arrived — in the early 1800s, and likely via Mexico — the Spanish guitar, which quickly caught on as an accompaniment to the local hula song and dance.

A few decades after the first guitar appeared in the islands, Joseph Kekuku (1874–1932), a Native Hawaiian youngster, flipped his own instrument to lie flat on his lap and played it with a piece of metal he slid across the strings. Over the next seven years he honed the lap-steel style and hacked his guitar to accommodate it, raising the strings from the fretboard. “The effect, as described by all who first heard it, was transcendent,” Troutman says. It “sonically revolutionized every musical tradition it touched. … Vaulted in status from serving as a typically rhythmic, accompanying instrument to that of a much more dynamic and melodic, or lead, instrument, the guitar would never be the same.”

Kekuku taught other islanders to play as he did, and then left to perform elsewhere, touring North America and Europe for an eventual three decades. He was one of many Native Hawaiians who left their homeland after 1893 — the year U.S. Marines overthrew the government and ended Hawaiian self-rule — more than a few of them carrying guitars and igniting a steel-slide craze wherever they went. In American sales of recorded music in 1916, Hawaiian guitar tunes topped all other genres.

Oral testimony, newspaper clippings, and other evidence show that Hawaiian musicians frequented southern cities from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Memphis, to New Orleans, “working every small town, nook, and holler along the way.” They sometimes collaborated with black musicians. Walter “Fats” Pichon (1906?–67), a New Orleans jazz singer and pianist, hired Hawaiian guitarist “King” Bennie Nawahi (1899–1985) to accompany him, for instance. Louis Armstrong featured Hawaiian guitar on a 1930 track. Racial segregation in the South likely increased the islanders’ contact with black Americans, since they would have shared boarding houses and restaurants with other nonwhite traveling entertainers.

“Most of the earliest documented African-American slide guitarists, and certainly the most significant, understood their style as that of playing ‘Hawaiian guitar,’” Troutman notes, even as they perfected their own techniques. References to Hawaii showed up in song titles (“Blue Hawaii,” “Hawaiian Harmony Blues”), and some blues musicians, such as Huddie Ledbetter (1888–1949), better known as Lead Belly, played Native Hawaiian ditties. Talking shop with an interviewer, Tampa Red, a popular blues guitarist of the 1920s and ’30s, recalled achieving a “Hawaiian effect” while using a bottleneck as a slide. In another interview, blues legend Eddie “Son” House (1902?–88) remembered first learning to play Hawaiian guitar, not the diddley bow — indicating that American pop culture rather than ancient African roots had the greater say in his musical development.

78-rpm recordings from the American recording industry are becoming highly prized artifacts. The “good ones,” I mean. Rare blues, gospel and hillbilly recordings, printed on labels like Paramount, Black Patti and Gennett, have attained a mythical status and become the subjects of intense bidding wars among collectors. As you can imagine, many collectors have started to question the point of it all and wondering if there isn’t an area of 78-rpm collecting designed for the obsessive and dogmatic. Jonathan Ward’s solution to this problem has been to pursue the rich musical content found on ethnic 78s.

Apart from enjoying the music contained within the foreign disks, Ward appreciates that inflated value hasn’t rendered ethnic recordings as physical objects to be lusted over. “I’m tired of people telling me what’s good,” said Ward of the American 78-rpm recordings. “I’m waiting for the day that someone says Vernon Dalhart and Kessinger waltzes are pretty fantastic. I really am.” It’s easier to form your own opinions about music, he realized, if your discs come from a forgotten corner of the world.

Born in a diverse musical household, the Massachusetts-native developed a worldly ear at a young age. Ward recollected moments from his childhood where his mother would be playing classical piano and his father, exiled to the driveway, would be droning away on his bagpipes. “Meanwhile, I’d be sitting with headphones on listening to Emerson Lake & Palmer’s ‘Brain Salad Surgery!’”

In his Echo Park apartment, Ward showed us how hearing an African one-string fiddle solo or a Mexican string band for the first time could be a lesson in empathy. He explained, “You have to be humble because these records were not made for you.” But it was hearing the strange and beautiful sounds of Madagascan music that first gave him the bug to start collecting African 78s. Ward described his collecting interests as a journey of the ears. “It has nothing to do with anyone else’s tastes. It’s really about new sounds – new to me!” he exclaimed.

In an effort to share these new sounds, Ward compiled Opika Pende: Africa at 78RPM (2013, Dust-to-Digital) to demonstrate the musical heterogeneity of the African recording industry. For this effort he received a Grammy nomination in the category of Best Historical Album.

His records are neatly organized by country and, despite their inherent antiquatedness, represent the globalizing effect of online connections and auction sites. The delicate, shellac disks are shipped halfway across the world to his Los Angeles doorstep and for all he knows, each could be one of a kind; if one breaks, there’s no telling if another may ever surface to replace it. This explained why earthquake chains anchored each of his record shelves. He showed us a record that had broken upon arrival and a mended seam that stretched across the lower half. The repairman is a well-kept secret among a select group of 78-rpm collectors.

Since 2007, Ward’s ongoing project has been the blog Excavated Shellac where he posts mp3 transfers of pieces from his collection. Scrolling down his blog, you’ll see excavated music from South America, India, Pakistan, Yemen and Scotland to name a few. A photo of the label and an informative article about the style, musician(s) and origin gives context to the recording. Written in a well-informed, dry-humored voice, Ward discusses the birth of recording industries on a global level, his commentary often focusing around small local labels and their role in preserving the idiosyncrasies of traditional performance practices before the homogenizing effects of mass communication technologies set in.

Sitting in his listening room and hearing his records was like experiencing a live version of Excavated Shellac. For each disk, he supplied answers to questions about style, date and geographical location. We were most blown away by the range in dates of 78-rpm distribution across the globe – in the States we set the bar for 78-rpm production between 1924-33, but in countries like Colombia, 78s were being produced as late as the ‘70s!

Though self-promotion is still the primary means of exposure for ethnic 78rpm collectors, archival labels like Dust-to-Digital have started giving a larger spotlight to their efforts in the form of fancy box sets with photographs and extensive liner notes. Ward’s accomplishment with his collection – to bring the corners of the world together in the form of early-recorded music – merits such fancy box sets and the resulting awards and nominations.

However, his lesser-heralded accomplishment with Excavated Shellac has been to unite information from the isolated fields of ethnomusicology, discographical history and record collector fandom into one resource (a free one I might add). Perhaps the fact that he is also a super-kind, generous and non-obsessive human being should be thrown in there as well. At any rate, we hope you enjoy the video and join us in applauding Excavated Shellac for inspiring young collectors and for suggesting that greater possibilities still exist for the collecting and enjoyment of music on the 78 medium.

Alec Smart intervened with a compromise. Printed music could be used for exhibition purposes,

but would not be allowed in the auditorium during the contest.

“I had the pleasure of hearing one of these fancy violinists last year,” said Mr. Jackson.

“He came a pesterin’ around through the mountains on the trail of what he called folk music. He

got three or four of us fiddlers together and prevailed on us to play for him, and he put down

little crooked notes in a black book.

Every time I’d get good started on a tune, he’d stop me while he caught up, and then tell me to start over. When he got through I asked him to play us a tune and he took my fiddle and [tinkered] with it a little bit and then sawed the bow up and down and seemed to be huntin’ around for something he never could find, and then he quit.

Uncle Jim Watson asked him why he didn’t go ahead and play something.

“’Why, I’ve just played it,’ this fellow said. But I don’t know but what he was joking. If he played any tune whatsoever, I clean missed it.”

In 1925, auto magnate Henry Ford, a fan of “Old Time” music, had been hosting fiddlers and square dancers at his home in Michigan for some time. This attracted a fair amount of talent, including Mr. Mellie Dunham of Maine who was soon being hailed as the “champion fiddler” of the U.S. Tales of a Northern usurper claiming such a title without first having faced the best of what the South had to offer incensed local promoter J.H. Gaston, who was quoted in the Chattanooga Times as saying, “How can a Yankee claim to know as much about fiddling as a ‘born fiddler’ from here in the Tennessee Valley where the art of old time fiddling originated?”

Gaston’s plan was simple. He would sponsor a competition to determine the best fiddler in the South and then send him up against Mr. Ford’s boy from Maine. That first event was held at the court house and Harrison resident “Sawmill” Tom Smith emerged the victor. Soon after that, Gaston dispatched a telegram to Ford asking him to tune in to local radio station WDOD at a particular time and date to hear Smith and learn what “real fiddling by a real fiddler” sounded like.

Ford’s reaction to that may not be known, but the local reaction was nothing short of astounding. A mere two years later the event had grown to more than 5,000 attendees and moved to the newly constructed Memorial Auditorium. By this time, the event had been renamed the All Southern Championship and was essentially THE contest of note, the big daddy of them all. The winner was crowned Champion Fiddler of the South and the biggest and best names of the day made it a point to attend and compete.

The event continued for more than a decade until the fuel rationing of World War II put an end to it and events like it across the country. That would be the end of our story if it weren’t for the efforts of a fellow named Matt Downer.

Matt is best known as half of local duo The Old Time Travelers, reviewed in this very column some months back. At the time, my impression of Matt and his partner Clark Williams was that they were nothing if not authentic, the living embodiment of the music they play. I stand by that assertion and if the proof is in the pudding, then here’s a particularly large helping of it: In 2010, Matt took it upon himself (in partnership with the Crisp family and Lindsay Street Hall) to revive the Fiddlers’ Convention here in Chattanooga. The feedback from the community (including scholars, historians, musicians and listeners) has been wonderful.

The event continues to grow annually, attracting more and more spectators and competitors every year. True to his nature, Matt has taken great pains to ensure the event is as faithful to its historical predecessor as possible. There are no amplifiers, no electrified instruments; the playing styles and tunes must be “old time.” Competitions will be held for fiddle, banjo, string band, dance and traditional singing.

“Prince” Albert Hunt, born Archibald Hunt, was delivered unto the world on December 20, 1896, in Terrell, Texas, the youngest of four children. His mother was a full-blooded Cherokee from Alabama, his father a full-blooded Irishman, and the fiddle music their son played was an amalgamation of the lilting bow figures of the Celts and the untamed war whoops of the Indians.

The raspy forcefulness of Hunt’s violin tone reflected the coarse huskiness of his singing, making it easy to imagine his music as the soundtrack to barroom knifings and shoot-’em-ups in dance halls throughout the Deep Ellum neighborhood of Dallas.

The drunken swagger of his voice seems to infect the rhythm in his 1928 and 1929 recordings for OKeh records in San Antonio and Dallas. On “Blues in a Bottle,” the guitar accompaniment stalls, elongates the beat, and then spreads the measure so Hunt can drawl out the verse, in effect both capturing and modifying, or marring, time.

Hunt learned to fiddle by stealing his father’s violin and sneaking away to play in graveyards late at night, cousins and bottles of whiskey in tow. His recorded music is perfectly consistent with this autodidactic approach: teach oneself while drunk in the cemetery such that one must be wasted and wading in death in order to play. One could scarcely anticipate something bad resulting from this methodology.

Prince Albert recorded only nine sides (one remains unissued and is presumably lost), about a decade after he was discharged from serving in the Army during the Great War. Most are vexingly rare—I only have one: “Wake Up Jacob,” with the flip side being “Waltz of Roses,” in “E” condition—and they are fiercely sought after due to their forceful, bluesy nature.

Though his recorded repertoire contained the usual suspects—the medicine show tune “Traveling Man,” a Jimmie Rodgers–influenced “Waltz of Roses,” the breakdowns “Wake Up Jacob”and “Houston Slide,” and the show stopper “Blues in a Bottle”—none of his performances were slavishly imitated by others.

Even so, Harry Smith thought enough of Hunt to include “Wake Up Jacob” in his seminal Anthology of American Folk Music (Social Music, Dances No. 1, Band 30). Rich Nevins issued “Blues in a Bottle” in his masterful series Times Ain’t Like They Used to Be, Volume 1, and Marshall Wyatt included “Traveling Man”in his Good for What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows, 1926-1937.

Hunt’s best pieces, in their best sound, are anthologized in Texas Fiddle Music, Vol. 1, on County Records. Although Hunt didn’t alter the course of vernacular folk music, and his influence on Western swing is minimal, he did leave a testament etched in the shellac grooves of his few recordings to an idiosyncratic sound that reflected the mongrel eccentricities of his time and place. Hunt played exactly what the people of Deep Ellum wanted: uninhibited fiddle dance pieces and an occasional waltz.

There are various ways of judging just how popular old-world tunes were in America. One way would be to analyze American printed tune-books. Another way, and I think that this is a better way, is to consider the repertoire of just one mountain fiddler, namely the blind fiddler Ed Haley (1883 – 1951).

Ed was born in Logan County, WVA, and played around the eastern Kentucky-western West Virginia region for most of his life. During the period 1946 – 1947 Ed’s son, Ralph Haley, recorded his father on a home disc-cutting machine. In 1997 Rounder Records issued sixty-five of these recordings on two double CD sets – Ed Haley: Forked Deer, CD1132 – 33, and Ed Haley: Grey Eagle, CD1134 – 35 – and I would estimate that over a quarter of these tunes (30% actually) can be traced back to old-world sources.These are:

CD1

Forked Deer

Known in America as early as 1839, the ‘fine’ strain of Forked Deer is similar to an old Scotch-Irish tune called Rachael Rae, which is believed to have been composed in 1815 by a Scottish composer called Joseph Lowe. O’Neill called it The Moving Bogs.

Indian Ate the Woodchuck

The second strain of this superb tune is clearly related to the tune Such a Getting Upstairs, which is also known as The Fife Hunt.

Humphrey’s Jig

A version of Bob of Fettercairn which can be found in the 18th century Scots Musical Museum.

Love Somebody

A version of My Love She’s But a Lassie Yet printed in 1757 as Miss Farquharson’s Reel in Bremner’s Scots Reels.

Salt River

Seems to be related to the Irish tune Carron’s Reel, which, according to Francis O’Neill, became attached to the Scots poem The Ewe wi the Crooked Horn.

CD2

Jenny Lind Polka

Composed by a German composer Anton Wallerstein c.1850.

Chicken Reel

Not the usual tune by this name, but possibly one based on an older, and untraced, Scots melody.

Wake Up Susan

Known in Ireland as The Mason’s Apron.

CD3

Grey Eagle

Tune 1214 in O’ Neil’s “Music of Ireland”, where it is titled The First Month of Summer. In Scotland it is known as The Miller of Drone.

Selling buffalo hides was for a short time a very lucrative business in the western frontier and countless hunters set out to get a slice of that cake. “Hills of Mexico”(or “Buffalo Skinners”) tells the adventurous story of a hunting party and their troubles. In the end the boss wants to deny his men their pay, so they kill him and leave his “bones to bleach on the range of the buffalo”.

“Buffalo Skinners” was first published by “Jack” Thorp in his Songs of the Cowboys (1908, as “Buffalo Range”, pp. 31-33).

N. Howard “Jack” Thorp (1867-1940) was originally from New York City but as a boy he used to spend the summers on a ranch in Nebraska. Later he moved to New Mexico to become a cowboy and he began learning their songs. In fact he soon was “a singing cowboy who carried his banjo-mandolin with him as he rode from cow camp to cow camp”. He started collecting songs in 1889. “His fifteen-hundred-mile horseback journey through New Mexico and Texas in 1889-90 was the first ballad-hunting adventure in the cowboy domain”. The first edition with 23 texts was privately published and only 1000 copies were printed.

Thorp’s book was the very first collection of cowboy songs and he was a pioneer in that field. But his efforts were quickly overshadowed by John A. Lomax from Texas whose Cowboy Songs And Other Frontier Ballads was published in 1910 and became much more influential, in fact it turned out to be the first stepping-stone towards that massive empire of Folk song he and later his son Alan were to erect in the following decades.

Lomax – at that time a professor for English at Texas A & M – had been interested in “frontier songs” for quite a long time. He sent a circular to local newspapers and teachers and asked for songs. Most of what was included in Cowboy Songs was received from these kind of sources and there was not much real fieldwork. Some texts were even cribbed from Thorp’s book.

Nonetheless he managed to publish 112 songs, among them many that would become classics of that genre, for example “Home On The Range”, “Whopee-Ti-Yi-Yo, Git Along Little Dogies”, “The Old Chisholm Trail”, “Sweet Betsy From The Pike”, “Jesse James”, “The Days Of Forty-Nine”. “In canonizing cowboy songs instead of ancient ballads, Lomax changed the face of the folk, replacing the sturdy British peasant with the mythical western cowboy”

edited excerpt from Paul L. Tyler (“Hillbilly Music Re-imagined: Folk and Country Music in the Midwest”):

America’s contemporary culture wars between Red States and Blue States yield regional maps that echo the old sectional divide of slaveholding versus free soil territories. While not an arena of political or social strife, folklore scholarship has also been visited by sectionalist mischief, particularly with regard to the study of the benign art form of American country music, once widely referred to as “hillbilly music.”

D. K. Wilgus asserted that “early hillbilly performers came not only from the lowland and upland South, but from the Great Plains and the Midwest.” His wisdom, that the music’s “essence was of rural America,” was ignored. Most country music historians equated the term “hillbilly” first with musicians from the upland South, and quickly expanded that symbolism to reflect on other regional styles contained in the section of the United States identified as the South.

I contend that alternative readings of the hillbilly symbol disclose similarities between the southern mountains and other socially and culturally distinctive places occupied by non-southern rural Americans. There are other rural music scenes and musicians whose stories should be considered in writing the full history of American country music.

The non-southern strain of early country music has been ill-served by the postwar recording industry. Most of what people know today about the sounds of early country music is from 78 rpm phonograph records re-issued in the modern formats of LP and CD. These projects have had a decidedly southern bias.

I have been fortunate to hear the sounds of hundreds of 78 rpm recordings of midwestern artists that have not been re-issued, and thus are not widely accessible to modern fans or scholars. To fully understand the scope and range of country music in the first half of the twentieth century, it is necessary to take a larger sample than was offered by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (SFW 40090) or by County Records 500 series of LPs.

The many titles in Yazoo’s re-issue series on CD, subtitled Early American Rural Music: Classic Recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, have provided only a few hints at what has been overlooked by other editors.

excerpt from Patrick Huber (“The New York Sound: Citybilly Recording Artists and the Creation of Hillbilly Music, 1924–1932″):

The studio system of hillbilly record production that flourished in New York in the mid- to late 1920s actually emerged from a long-standing industry practice. Since at least 1900, talking machine companies had employed a small roster of two dozen or so freelance studio singers to record the bulk of the selections for their popular catalogs.

In the 1920s, this production model fell out of favor in the pop music field as a result of rising public demand for recordings by vaudeville and radio stars, but the fledgling hillbilly recording industry embraced the studio singer system, particularly before 1927. After all, as Charles K. Wolfe reminds us, most of the singers and musicians discovered in the South, “were basically amateurs who, though often highly gifted and innovative folk artists,” had a limited repertoire of only four to six marketable songs and had little, if any, formal musical training.

Professional studio singers, on the other hand, offered talking machine companies several distinct advantages over supposedly more “authentic” and “traditional” southern singers and musicians. First, New York studio singers were experienced professionals who had proven themselves capable of successfully negotiating the rigorous, sometimes nerve-racking demands of making phonograph recordings. This was particularly true during the pre-1925 era of acoustic recording, when new artists facing the intimidating recording horn for the first time often suffered what industry insiders referred to as “horn fright”.

Second, these veteran recording artists were able to handle an array of musical material in a variety of musical styles, even to the point of being able to closely imitate the vocal nuances and phrasing of other hillbilly singing stars such as Charlie Poole, Jimmie Rodgers, and even Vernon Dalhart himself.

Third, unlike most southern hillbilly artists, many of these studio singers were formally and sometimes classically trained artists who could read a lead sheet and then, with little rehearsal, quickly master new material assigned to them by A&R men, sometimes in the studio on the very day of the recording itself. Such efficiency enabled record companies to finish studio sessions in a minimum amount of time and thereby reduce overhead costs such as having to pay musical accompanists for an additional session.

Studio singers’ high level of professionalism and musical literacy also allowed record companies, ever alert to shifting musical trends and changing public tastes, to rush onto the market both newly published songs and cover versions of competing companies’ hit records before such numbers peaked in popularity.

Finally, and most obviously, these New York-based studio veterans were easily accessible and available to work with minimal advance notice. As a result of these distinct advantages, studio singers served as the “workhorses” of this system of hillbilly record production, and their steady output, particularly prior to 1927, provided a significant percentage of the recordings in hillbilly catalogs.

Real World 25 (3 CD retrospective set, 28 page booklet containing the story of 25 Years of Real World Records, and a collection of Real World Tales with contributions from musicians, producers, designer and managers), Real World Records

edited from afropop.org:

Real World Records turns 25 this year. That any record label dedicated to global sounds has survived this long is impressive; many others have gone by the wayside or changed course. Real World 25, a three-CD compilation drawing from the label’s more than 200 releases, offers an expansive tour of this history with music ranging from Thomas Mapfumo, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Hukwe Zawose, Remmy Ongala. Papa Wemba, and the Blind Boys of Alabama.

Looking at Real World’s African releases, a number of things stand out—starting with the label’s trademark diversity. Real World shepherded Congolese vocal star Papa Wemba through his most successful experimental phase, when he wrestled to become an artist in his own right, unconstrained by the fierce conformity of Congolese pop.

Aside from Remmy Ongala, Real World brought to light acts that few of us might ever have heard about otherwise. I’m thinking of the northern Mozambique folk-pop band Eyuphuro, or Kenya’s idiosyncratic maestro Ayub Ogada, the transfixing sonic textures of Tanzania’s Hukwe Zawose and family, or Somalia’s legendary (at least in Somalia) singer Maryam Mursal, all of whom produced classic, enduring releases for Real World.

The label has also released works by recognized African icons, including Thomas Mapfumo, the Lion of Zimbabwe. Real World’s 2006Mapfumo release Rise Up may be the most important album of the singer’s years in exile from Zimbabwe.“What an extraordinary artist,” says Jones. “Talk about people of political significance, artists who are world-changing—Thomas Mapfumo is exactly that.” Of course, political impact is not a requirement for Real World either—just a nice plus. And Mapfumo certainly passes the passion test.

Looking back on 25 years, Real World’s veteran director Amanda Jones sees vividly how the landscape has changed. Back then, international music releases mostly came from what she calls “library labels” like Ocora and Le Chant du Monde in France, or Lyrichord and Nonesuch Explorer in the U.S., all of which tended to focus on traditions. The idea of specializing in contemporary international music was just dawning, especially in the U.S.

Today, with the Internet and YouTube, Jones sees “a great democratizing of access to the music.” But these developments have raised a new set of problems for aspiring global artists—namely, distinguishing yourself amid a vast ocean of offerings.

“I’m the Zelig of the folk music world,” says John Cohen, laughing. “Always there in the background.”

A lot of documenting of American roots music at that time was by enthusiasts like yourself and not necessarily big record companies or even professional archivists. If people like you were not documenting these things we would have lost much of this music.

The old-time music was still around but it was dying out. We gave it a big push just by looking at it and presenting it. That might be a good way to think about what we did. I’m playing with a young band now, the Down Hill Strugglers. They’re wonderful and they have same musical taste and the same idea about music that the Ramblers had, which is really exiting. Since Mike Seeger died and the Ramblers were finished, it was strange for me, empty. But then these guys came by and it was full.

You have a song on the soundtrack to the Coen Brothers film “Inside Llewyn Davis,” which was set during the folk revival. What did you think of the film?

I liked it. I know lot of people who say it wasn’t that way. But I don’t care, I liked it. What I got from the film was it reminded me of all the anxieties of that period. Not the specifics, but the anxieties. Should you do this or should you do that. Should you go commercial and if you go commercial, then what happens if you give up a regular life. What happens if you lean this way, what happens if you lean that way. All these things. If you go all the way to Chicago to make a hit and change your mind and do something very traditional — those are the kinds of anxieties that I remember tremendously all the time. There were the commercial possibilities all around us and we weren’t taking them.

Your new book features photographs you took of Woody Guthrie. How did you meet him?

I first saw him in person in 1950. He was not that far gone yet. He was starting down that path. I had seen him over the years, a little bit here little bit there. What it really came down to his muscles were out of control [due to his suffering from Huntington’s Disease]. There were people who photographed him that way. But I couldn’t bear doing that. I could see a certain dignity and strength that would show up and that’s what I photographed. I didn’t want to look for pity or anything like that. Most of my photographs have some of that spark still with him.

At a later stage, it was very strange. You could go to [the hospital] and say, “I’d like to take Woody Guthrie to New York to take him to a concert.” “Okay! Hey Woody!” There was no great security. I felt I was going to a library and checking out Woody Guthrie.

I sat with him in a big concert at Carnegie Hall. It was in a special box. And Pete Seeger was onstage singing that wonderful [Woody Guthrie] song “Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos).” Everybody was singing along with it. But Woody hadn’t meant it to be a song. It was just a poem to him. So he was reciting it as a poem. Hearing him in one ear and then thousands of people singing it as a song in another ear was very touching.

I knew him a little bit earlier. I visited him at record stores, we had some conversations. He was also sort of lost and always was a little bit difficult at first in person. But I was so deeply appreciative of his music. It meant so much to me. That was quite comfortable. And I am blessed in a strange way that I had a similar easygoing relationship with Dylan. It was never a big promotional buddy-buddy kind of thing either

Lead Kindly Light, by Sarah Bryan and Peter Honig, is a nifty package consisting of a hundred or so old photographs, many of them found in secondhand stores throughout the Carolinas, and a pair of CDs containing digital remastering of primarily country-fiddle 78s from the 1920s and ’30s.

Harking back to a July 27, 1927 recording session featuring the Blue Ridge Corn Shuckers, Honig imagines a scene in which the group’s leader, Ernest Van Stoneman, tells his fellow pickers that the storied Victor Records producer Ralph Peer believes more money will be made if the Shuckers can come up with a proto–Hee Haw skit to accompany the music. None of the musicians are too crazy about this, but fiddler Eck Dunford suggests everyone can play a bit and then pretend to take a swig of corn liquor.

Reached at the home where he lives with Ms. Bryan near Durham, North Carolina, Honig told me, “Ole Eck was right about that. Just can’t get enough of it.” A fiddler himself, Honig, 61 — who grew up in the less piney confines of Westport, Connecticut — takes a good-natured if unsentimental tack on the 46 recordings in Lead Kindly Light.

“There are a lot of fiddle tunes because that’s mostly what I’ve got, and you don’t hear them as much on much of archival reissues the way you do guitar and blues records. I’ve been acquiring this stuff for more than 30 years, but I don’t have a giant collection by most standards. I am not encyclopedic. I have what I like and play them often. I’m not romantic about the past or think that things used to be better than they are now. I just think the music was better. Or I like it better.”

The same publisher-packager, Dust-to-Digital, offers Parchman, a collection of photos and field recordings made at the Mississippi State Penitentiary by the unmatched Alan Lomax during the 1940s and ’50s. Not to slight the magisterial contributions of someone who was the first to record Muddy Waters and got Jelly Roll Morton to recount, self-aggrandizingly, his life and times, but works by Lomax and other professional folklorists often smack of the museum. The template of the maniacal, sweaty-browed collector who will do almost anything to lay his hands on a Maltese-falcon-like 78 was set for all time by the cartoonist R. Crumb, the best known of these backwoods record stalkers. Lead Kindly Light takes a more joyfully relaxed approach to its beloved materials.

The first song on side 2 of “Led Zeppelin III”, “Gallows Pole,” began with acoustic twelve-string guitar, banjo, and mandolin, instrumentation the band had never used before in such a stark, acoustic man­ner. The song did eventually employ electric guitar, bass, and drums, and approximate Led Zeppelin’s hard-driving approach to other material, but the arrangement built up to that gradually during the course of the song.

The lyrics, meanwhile, told a strange story in which the narrator, apparently a man about to be hanged, implores a hangman to “hold it a little while” until various family members arrive to save him. The narrator’s brother arrives with gold and silver to pay off the hangman.

Then his sister arrives, and the narrator implores her to lead the hangman to “some shady bower.” She does so, and “warms [the hangman’s] blood from cold,” whereupon the narrator asks to be set free. Instead, the Hangman replies, “Your brother brought me silver, your sister warmed my soul/ But now I laugh and pull so hard, see you swinging from the Gallows Pole.”

Few of Led Zeppelin’s fans would recognize this song as a version of the ancient ballad “The Maid Freed from the Gallows,” which is number 95 in the clas­sic collection published in the late nineteenth century by Francis James Child. Indeed, Led Zep­pelin’s plot is quite different from most versions of this ballad. In most, each family member fails to arrive with gold or silver, until the narrator’s sweetheart arrives to save the day. So where did they find this unusual song, and how did they adapt it?

Led Zeppelin’s ultimate source was Lead Belly. But according to lead guitarist Jimmy Page (quoted in Keith Shadwick’s 2005 book Led Zeppelin: The Story of a Band and Their Music), they originally heard the song from a California folksinger named Fred Gerlach, who adapted Lead Belly’s version for his 1962 Folkways LP Twelve-String Gui­tar: Folk Songs and Blues Sung and Played by Fred Gerlach. Gerlach probably heard the commercial recording made by Lead Belly in 1939 for Musicraft, a small New York City record label; no other recording of Lead Belly singing this song was published prior to 1962.

According to Page, Led Zeppelin started with the Gerlach version. Robert Plant rewrote the verses to include the sister’s seduction of the hangman, the hangman’s betrayal, and the death of the narrator. Page and the other band members added the folk-rock arrangement. Because Page and John Paul Jones each overdubbed several instruments into the arrangement, Page alone playing six-string and twelve-string acoustic guitars, electric guitar, and banjo, the band was un­able to reproduce the arrangement live. They therefore played the song only a few times in concert, but it has lived on as a classic album track.

Sheila Kay Adams is the seventh-generation bearer of her family’s two-hundred-year-old ballad-singing tradition, and is the mother and teacher of the eighth generation. Her own teachers were her great-aunt Dellie Norton, cousin Cass Wallin, and other kinfolks in the Wallin, Chandler, Norton, Ramsey, and Ray families of Sodom, North Carolina, who have so long been admired by ballad singers and collectors. In 1998, folklorist Dan Patterson wrote in the North Carolina Folklore Journal that “These families have made Sodom famous, out of all proportion to its size.” The tiny community is a giant in fostering the folk traditions of North Carolina.

What was it about Madison county, NC, that made it such fertile ground for ballads? For author/singer/storyteller Sheila Kay Adams, it wasn’t Madison County per se, but Sodom, where she was born and remains, that nurtured the ballads so well.

“If you talk about Madison County preserving the love songs (another southern mountain term for ballads),” says Adams, “it was mainly Sodom. Because people in Sodom stayed put. My however-many-greats-back grandfather Norton got a land grant in the eighteenth century and we’ve been right there ever since. People in other communities moved around, left Madison County, came back, whatever. In Sodom, people never moved.”

When I talked to Lee Wallin’s son Doug at the Wallins’ Craine Branch cabin way back in ‘84, he gave me the same answer. “Well, I guess it’s really because there’s so many people from the old countries that settled right in here. And a lot of them stayed and didn’t move out.”

The New Deal brought the most concerted and multilateral documentation of American life and culture we have ever known. The Federal Writers’ Project sent reporters into every state to record cultural life as it was actually lived, to collect not only what Ben Botkin, director of the project’s folklore section, called “living lore,” but also to take the testimony of living European immigrants and former slaves, as well as to depict, journalistically, the entire sense of life in given regions and urban districts.

The Farm Security Administration sent writers and photographers into stricken agricultural areas to record the lives of men and women and children, and the circumstances in which they lived, in literary and photographic documents such as James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which remain touchstones of America’s image of itself as an agricultural, popular, and folk society.

The Resettlement Administration engaged musicologist Charles Seeger to find ways, through the encouragement of indigenous musical resources, to foster the consolidation of communities around the project of economic and social self-help. Muralists glorified the working life in countless public buildings, and a vast pictorial record, in photographs and drawings, of American folk crafts, The Index of American Design, was initiated under government auspices.

The Roosevelts themselves opened the White House in a series of nine concerts between 1934 and 1942, on one occasion with the king and queen of England in attendance, to traditional singers and musicians, including the North Carolina Spiritual Singers, organized by the Federal Music Project; a mountain string band called the Coon Creek Girls; an old sailor from Virginia, Dan Hunt, who sang sea chanties; and, because he and his father were the foremost collectors of them, Alan Lomax to sing cowboy songs.

The folk revival began in the 1930s, then, under “the man who couldn’t walk around,” as his friend Josh White called him in a blues song. Well, not really. The Roosevelt administration had simply reached out into what by the 1920s had already become a brisk trade in the representation, as well as the commercial, political, and social exploitation, of folk culture.

Pioneer record-company advance men such as Ralph Peer and Art Satherly, beginning in 1923, had begun to tap the immense resources in nineteenth- century social and display music, folk and commercial, still flourishing in southern folklife: now-familiar figures such as the Carter Family, the Stoneman Family, and Jimmie Rodgers won fame as performers and recording artists playing and singing traditional songs, of which they were both collectors and creators, to regional audiences.

A parallel development was occurring on the vaudeville circuit, where singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith supplied the urban and rural African American marketplaces with a newly introspective blues and jazz music, opening the way for many black rural singers and guitarists such as Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson who left behind them on “race” records documents of prodigious musical and poetic genius.

Commercial broadcasting, with its institution the radio barn dance, initiated by Nashville newspaper humorist George Hay’s “Grand Ole Opry,” brought traditional dance fiddling, minstrelsy, and the Saturday night play party, in performers such as Uncle Jimmy Thompson, Uncle Dave Macon, and Dr. Humphrey Bate and the Possum Hunters, to parlors urban and rural throughout the South and Midwest, recalling, with gentle satire, the old times before the First World War. This was a “folk revival” too.

During the 1920s and ’30s, the records and radio shows of A.P. Carter, his wife Sara, and sister-in-law Maybelle spread the music of the southern mountains around the world and earned the Carter family international fame.

Sunny Side of Life celebrates the legacy of this country music dynasty by focusing on the Carter Family Fold in Maces Spring, Virginia–an old-time music hall founded in 1975 by Janette, Joe, and Gladys, the children of A.P. and Sara Carter.

Sunny Side of Life features Saturday night performances at the Fold by such artists as the Home Folks, Red Clay Ramblers, and Hot Mud Family, as well as lots of flatfooting and clogging by the audience.

The film includes a history of the Carter Family and an examination of the way old-time music continues to be integrated into the life of this community.

“Surpasses any documentary I have seen in articulating the emotional ties which lie at the heart of old-time country music and the Appalachian experience.” -Richard Blaustein, Director, Center for Appalachian Studies and Services, East Tennessee State University

Square dancing made its return to the Pendleton County Fair in Circleville,West Virginia, this year after a two-year absence as part of the Mountain Dance Trail.

The return of the Pendleton County dance was spurred by the Augusta Heritage Center, a resource for folk life studies out of Davis & Elkins College, about an hour away. The center’s Mountain Dance Trail project has helped organize dances across the state, cultivating tradition county by county. With a nod to the Bourbon Trail in Kentucky and the Crooked Road music trail in Virginia, it is a homegrown effort to revive and brand a West Virginia legacy.

Circleville is an unincorporated area with fewer than 350 households about three and a half hours from Washington. “The nice thing about a county like this,” Mr. Nelson said, talking about dancing but not only that, is that “if you screw up, they’ll straighten you right out.”

The Mountain Dance Trail began this year as an oral history project. Through the AmeriCorps program, Mr. Milnes hired Becky Hill, 23, an alumna of Davis & Elkins, and with money from a Kickstarter fund and some small state grants, the two traveled along Route 33, which runs east to west across the state, interviewing the oldest square dance callers they could find, documenting their dance styles and histories.

“The reason we did interviews was to capture these stories, about the boozing and the drinking and the fighting,” Ms. Hill said. “What makes this dance so important is not just a dance move, but everything that’s around that, that makes it alive.”

“It’s like regional identity for a lot of the folks around here,” she added. “They grow up with the fiddle music and the banjo music, and dancing in their homes. It’s part of who they are.”

REEL ‘EM, BOYS, REEL ‘EM features West Virginia traditional square dancing and step dancing and follows the Mountain Dance Trail as it winds across the Mountain State. Interviews with callers, musicians, dancers and dance historians, along with current square dance footage and archival footage from Augusta Heritage Center are combined to create a film that celebrates the importance of old-time music and dance. Centuries old dance customs are discussed and revealed in the traditions as they exist today. This film documents the exceptional endurance of traditional dance in West Virginia.

The Mountain Dance Trail project celebrates West Virginia as the only Appalachian state that maintains a strong community dance tradition. The dance trail follows a route from the Potomac Highlands in the eastern part of the state, to the Ohio River in the west, connecting 10 communities that still host old-time mountain square dances.

Square dance styles vary throughout the state, from the “Mountain Circle” or “Big Circle” dances in the east, to Appalachian four-couple squares in the west. “Round Dances,” like waltzes and two steps, are played between square dances at most locations.

Square dance culture has been losing ground over the last 50 years, but West Virginia has held on to traditional dancing in small towns and communities across the center of the state. The idea behind The Mountain Dance Trail is to honor, embrace, and promote these dance traditions and to preserve Appalachian old-time dance in its localized forms.

In the fall of 1937, Alan Lomax and his wife Elizabeth traveled throughout the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, documenting the region’s traditional music for the Library of Congress. Two months later they returned to the Library with over 32 hours of recordings of ballad singers and songsters; Baptist, Methodist, and Pentecostal hymns; children’s game songs and lullabies; and dozens of fiddlers, guitarists, harp-blowers, and banjo players.

The farmers, coal miners, preachers, housewives, public officials, and itinerant “musicianeers” who sang into Lomax’s microphone were the inheritors and practitioners of one of America’s – and the world’s – richest musical legacies. Until now, only a fraction of these recordings have been known to the public.

In late 2011, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress undertook the digital preservation of these priceless cultural documents, transferring the 228 fragile original acetate discs to WAV files. UK Special Collections, the AFC, and ACE are now collaborating on the online presentation of these recordings in a searchable database of streaming audio. Launch is planned for early 2015, Alan Lomax’s centennial year.

Festival is a documentary of the Newport Folk Festivals from 1963 to 1966. In 97 black and white minutes we are given clips of nearly 50 performers, not a single number is presented from start to uninterrupted finish. There is a magnificent interview with Mike Bloomfield, a stunning close-up monologue in which the gifted Son House explains the BLUES – a few minutes worth the price the admission – the always mind-blowing Howlin’ Wolf, and, lastly, the holy grail of film footage, the first available film of Dylan’s first electric set.

“Festival” is a cinematic synthesis of four Newport Folk Festivals in which the art of folk music is pictured in transition during its most crucial years. The range is also from the high-priced professionals like Peter, Paul, and Mary to the authentic folk dignity of living legends such as Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Eck Robertson, Clayton McMichen, Texas Gladden, and the Ed Young Fife and Drum Corps, and numerous others that give a feeling of community with the whole American present, and continuity with the American past.

Indeed, the long-haired Newport audiences pictured sleeping on beaches and on the grounds, in sports cars and battered station wagons, plunking banjoes and guitars, swapping tunes between formal concerts, and talking about folk music, seem not a rupture with the American past, but an expression of carrying forward an American idealism and social concern.

Art Rosenbaum’s interest in Mary Lomax and her sister Bonnie Loggins sprang not from music, but through a shared connection to the visual arts. In the early 2000s, Cleveland, Georgia folk art dealer Barbara C. Brogdon introduced Rosenbaum to the self-taught artist Bonnie Loggins. Rosenbaum was immediately captivated; not only by Bonnie’s visual artistry, but also intrigued by the traditional folk songs Bonnie had inherited from her father.

Bonnie dispensed these tunes and ballads, as well as her own inventive songs and poems, often and with great pleasure. It was during a visit with Bonnie in 2006 that Rosenbaum met the painter and muralist’s sister, Mary, who had taken on the responsibility of documenting her father’s folk songs and ballads.

Unlike Bonnie, whose illiteracy restricted her repertoire to childhood memory, Mary referred to typewritten texts to perform her father’s ballads. The sister’s interest in their father’s songs and tunes has resulted in one of the most comprehensive collections of music from the Southern Appalachians, which Art Rosenbaum has chronicled with care.

The Mary Lomax Ballad Book: America’s Great 21st Century Traditional Singer—collected and annotated by Art Rosenbaum—reads as a collection of transcribed ballads and fiddle tunes. The hardcover, designed by Susan Archie of World of anArchie, includes two CDs with 59 songs, plus another 20 transcriptions without accompanying audio.

The book is divided into discs A and B, with a brief introduction and explanation of the songs included. Together, the collection paints a rich portrait of an oral tradition passed down to Mary and her sister Bonnie through their late father, and the continuation of that tradition in their own music. The folk form comes to life on the lips of Mary Lomax, for example in “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” (highlighting a great sense of humor) and all-instrumental songs like “Rocky Road to My Daughter’s House” [fiddle by Roy Tench] give the feeling of a human presence long forgotten in the mountains of North Georgia.

Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer are 30-something songwriters who have released an album of seven Child ballads. They reworked many of the songs, using the multiple versions of lyrics from the books as raw material. They felt free to create their own melodies because Francis James Child specified only words, not music.

“That’s a much different process than when you’re given a single version of a song, maybe it’s a source recording [or] some old version,” Hamer says. “But you have this one text which you have to treat like the holy grail, but with the Child ballads you have choices.”

They substituted phrases, cut verses and even made new ones up.

For us, we were able to kind of pick and choose between these different versions,” Mitchell says.

The young songwriters’ choices were guided by their desire to make the stories clear to modern American audiences. So they updated archaic phrases like “tirled at the pin,” which means knocking at the door, to something more familiar.

“Especially for our American listeners, we didn’t want to throw up a roadblock for them so that then they’re like, ‘What’s that mean?’ And they miss the whole stanza,” she says.

The most dramatic revision they made was to “Tam Lin,” an epic ballad that clocks in at nearly seven minutes and has 27 verses. It’s the story of a young maiden who gets pregnant by a woodland shape-shifter named Tam Lin. As he morphs from one fearsome creature to the next, his lover has to hold on to him until he finally becomes human.

Hamer and Mitchell decided to axe the back story about a fairy queen who kidnaps and curses Tam Lin.

“If you take that away, you perhaps increase the sort of surreal psychological subtext,” Hamer says. “Maybe you even strengthen the metaphor for endurance of love through adversity.”

“I’m sure both of us have felt the kind of trepidation that anyone rolling up their sleeves with this material feels,” Mitchell says. “Like, are we going to mess it up in some way?”

Country Music Goes to War, in its 14 chapters, covers a great deal of ground, including Australia and Northern Ireland. Domestically, its authors look at the Civil War, the early years in commercial country music (from 1923 on), several examinations of the impact of World War II , Korea, the Cold War, the threat of the atom bomb on country music, the Toby Keith-Dixie Chicks era of Gulf War II, and 9/11 and its impact on country music. The Vietnam War, a fertile battleground of war songs, is not examined here and deserves its own book (as the authors note in their introduction).

The essays in Country Music Goes to War demonstrate that country musicians’ engagement with significant political and military issues is not strictly a twenty-first-century phenomenon. The contributors examine the output of country musicians responding to America’s large-scale confrontations in recent history. They address the ways in which country songs and artists have energized public discourse, captured hearts, and inspired millions of minds.

Andrew K. Smith and James E. Akenson catalogue a number of country songs and albums that invoke the Civil War. Charles K. Wolfe traces the emergence of the war song in early country music, and in a second essay combines original interviews with solid textual analysis and an awareness of historical context to fashion a solid overview of the short-lived atomic bomb genre in country music.

Entries chronicle the World War II experiences of Kentucky entrepreneur John Lair, the “Hayloft Gang” of Chicago’s National Barn Dance, and Gene Autry.

Hollywood wanted to punish cowboy singing star and actor Gene Autry for joining the military and serving in World War II. The head of his movie studio, Herbert Yates of Republic Pictures, threatened to “break” Autry and to promote Roy Rogers (who had a deferment as a father) over Autry if he refused Yates’ offer to have Republic engineer a deferment for Autry — as Yates had done for John Wayne. Republic Pictures felt that the studio’s success was more important than the war effort. Autry became a pilot in the Army Air Corps, and Yates did everything in his power for years to scuttle Autry’s career.

Going Down to Raleigh: Stringband Music in the North Carolina Piedmont 1976-1998 is a collection of field recordings that highlight the distinctive music traditions of the Piedmont region, including fiddlers, banjo players and other instrumentalists and singers who learned their music from family and friends. The 2-CD anthology includes full liner notes and documentary photos of the musicians. Listen to some samples from Going Down to Raleigh.

The richness of musical traditions of the eastern and central North Carolina Piedmont comes into sharper focus when these musicians are heard together. Fiddle and banjo music have long established histories in the region, as evident from the particular tunes played, the instrumental and singing styles employed, and from the stories about where and how the pieces were learned.

None of the people co-producer Wayne Martin recorded were playing music professionally and that was something they had no aspirations to do. Martin did what he could to get their music out to a wider audience, but convincing them it was worth the effort was a tall order.

“What I misinterpreted was their eagerness to promote themselves,” Martin says. “They weren’t at all interested. I remember finishing a recording with Lauchlin Shaw, and he was pleased with it. But it was never as important to him as it was to me to get a CD of his music out there. So not as many CDs as I’d hoped for came to pass. And this project was an attempt to bring them together in one place.”

The good part about that modesty is that it keeps the music real. Raw as it is, the music on “Going Down To Raleigh” sounds truly grounded in real life. But the downside of that modesty is that it makes the music easier to ignore. Martin can get downright evangelical about that.

“I’m not sure North Carolina knows itself that well,” he says. “I feel like more needs to be done to encourage us to embrace our own music and traditions. Not to glorify so much as know and understand. There’s a lot more to it: a historical context and economy that preceded what we have now and shaped this area. I’m doing my little part to get one piece out there so people can have more information.”